


Fifty Years

by MissCora



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-11
Updated: 2013-04-11
Packaged: 2017-12-08 03:48:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/756701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissCora/pseuds/MissCora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt: Quotes #4 - That we arrived at fifty years together is due as much to luck as to love, and a talent for knowing, when we stumble, where to fall, and how to get up again. - Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, Ossie and Ruby, In This life Together</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fifty Years

**Author's Note:**

> Many, _many_ thanks to my fantabulous beta, [](http://incandescently.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://incandescently.livejournal.com/)**incandescently** , who somehow manages to keep me from mutilating the English language _too_ badly. She's a peach, even if she does beat herself up for TOTALLY UNDERSTANDABLE DELAYS and should be drowned in rainbows and kittens until she accepts that I loff her.
> 
> Written originally for the 2009 Space Married challenge, reposted here for archival purposes in preparation for the new movie.

The sun had risen a few hours ago by the light, but Jim was in no hurry to get up. He’d been awake a while, watching the room brighten slowly and the steady rise and fall of Bones’ chest under the soft sheets. Years ago the return of consciousness would have brought the return of motion, his need for constant challenge driving him to burst out of bed and face the day with a cocky swagger and his ever present smirk. Now, though, he was happy to just lay in the quiet peace for a few extra hours. Truthfully, he’d have been perfectly happy to spend the whole day in bed – particularly in bed with Bones. After all, lying amongst the comfort of the pillows with the warmth of the body next to him it was easier to ignore the ravages of time hinted at with the creaking of his knees and the aching of his back when he arose.

This burgeoning plan, however, had a very serious flaw that made itself apparent in the loud rapping on the door and his stepdaughter’s voice. “Dad, Jim, are you ever getting up? People will be here soon.”

Bones reply was little more than a muttered curse which, hopefully, Joanna couldn’t hear before he groaned, pushing himself up on his elbows and arching an eyebrow when he saw Jim watching him. “We’re up, Jo-Jo, we’re up,” he called out. “Be down in a bit.”

“I’ll get breakfast on then.” And the two of them could hear her soft footsteps heading down the hallway followed by the distant murmur of voices – presumably giving some direction or other to her husband or one of the kids.

“And how long have you been awake, you hyperactive brat?” Bones groused affectionately, sitting up properly to stretch, and it didn’t escape Jim’s notice that there was more than a bit of creak to Bones’ motion, too. Not that he’d say anything about it. Jim valued his domestic peace too much, and didn’t that just beat all.

“Man, Bones, I think sometime after I hit forty you really could have given up on the brat thing. Or at least when I made Admiral.” Which argument would possibly have been more effective if he hadn’t been pouting.

“Nope. Always be my brat,” was the low answer, followed by a deep kiss before Bones levered himself out of the bed. “Gonna go get a shower. Coming?”

“You know it.”

 

\---

 

It was a good thing, Jim mused as he eyed the chaos in his kitchen, that they’d ended up in a big house.

It had been a near thing – after their years in space they were both more used to tight quarters, fitting everything they owned into tiny cabinets in bulkheads and choreographing their mornings around each other in narrow shipboard bathrooms. Jim called it ‘cozy’ and Bones called it ‘cramped’ in a way which Jim knew meant ‘close and perfect’.

When it finally came time to return to earth, to buy a place and settle down, they both thought they would simply get an apartment in San Francisco near the Academy. Easy to clean and maintain and convenient for work which were both higher priorities than the need to “keep up appearances as befit their station”. But the brass had insisted they at least look at proper houses; they were Admirals now, after all, and “that’s how we do things on earth, men. You hear me, Kirk? No more flyboy shenanigans.”

As Bones put it, “if taking a few damn meetings with some lady in a red jacket’ll keep them off our backs then we take the damn meetings,” but there’d been no intention to buy. That would be too much like putting down real roots and admitting they weren’t getting back in to space

No, they’d been settled on getting a nice apartment, maybe a condo.

It was the view that changed everything.

If their appointment with the realtor had been even twenty minutes earlier it never would have happened. In their lives there had always been those perfect confluences of events, moments that changed everything; wild, frightened eyes in a shuttle and “I may throw up on you,” sharp breaths against his cheek in a dark cave, cowering together against the explosions outside with a “Dammit, when we get back, you’re marrying me, asshole.” This had just been one more.

The memory was burned in Jim’s mind.

_The sharp slam of a car door could be heard clearly over the breeze ruffling through the trees and the deep orange-red of the setting sun outlined Bones as he stood at the edge of the bluff, staring down at the city spread out below them. Voice low as his head tilted up to the endless expanse of sky and ocean. “We’d be able to see the stars at night, Jimmy,” and there really wasn’t any question of condominiums or renting some place just to piss off the brass after that._

Just as well, given the overflowing countertops in the kitchen where Jo and David’s wife and all of their respective daughters had taken over arranging the food, not to mention the veritable hordes crowding the living and dining room. And they were all family and friends and family _of_ friends but Jim could tell it was a bit overwhelming for Bones. There was that Look. The one which said his misanthropic doctor was about to start swearing at the first person to bump in to him and chances were good it’d be one of the kids darting between adult bodies, snatching cookies from unguarded plates in their on-going effort to pretend they were still the babies of the family, and yelling at David’s boy with his grandfather’s enormous blue eyes would be a sin.

So it was purest coincidence that a step forward put Jim smack in the middle of the sunlight pouring in to the room, setting a halo of light around his head as it filtered through his hair (and anyone who claimed there was more silver than gold these days was a filthy liar and would be shot). “Well, I’m here, people, the party can start!”

Not that James T. Kirk ever really needed an excuse to make himself the center of attention, and the amused snort from behind told him Bones knew exactly what he was doing, he wasn’t fooling anyone, least of all Bones. But Jim didn’t even have to look back to know that the other man was smiling affectionately as they headed towards the seats which had opened up for them on the couch in the living room with its bay window and its incredible view, which could never be as incredible as the sight of their family gathered around them.

 

\---

 

Jim couldn’t remember the last time he’d been this full or this blissfully happy. Hell, he couldn’t actually remember the last time he’d seen some of these people, for all that they wrote and comm’d and kept track of what everyone was up to via Fleet announcements and news waves. He was pretty sure Chekov and Sulu hadn’t even been on Earth in more than three years but they’d made it to the party. They’d all made it. His crew, and Bones’ staff and Joanna and David and Sam’s boy Peter and all their spouses gathered around the massive dining room table, the need for which Bones had once argued so vehemently against.

_“When the hell are we gonna need a table with four damn leaves, Jim?” and he’d had no answer but he’d bought it anyway, because he liked the carving and the feel of real wood after decades of shipboard plastics. Bones hadn’t even complained that much when he redesigned the whole dining room around it._

And if all of those people weren’t enough then there were the grandkids, maybe not so little now as Jim liked to think. They had jobs and degrees, David’s _youngest_ was finishing school this year and, like the last nail in the coffin of Jim’s delusions of still being a young man, it was looking like they’d be great-grandparents by New Year. But they’d happily taken their banishment to the tight quarters of the smaller ‘kids table’ in the kitchen, conveniently close to the desert spread and where they hadn’t had to hear Bones talking immunizations and parasitic infestations with his Starfleet Medical coworkers as steady surgeons hands sliced in to the ham and dished out plates of proper greens.

But eventually plates were cleared and the pies, at least, had been rescued from the ravages of the younger generation (even if the cookies had to be sacrificed for the greater good) while coffee made it’s way around the table. The look Bones gave him was definitely resigned as the edge of Jim’s knife somehow, purely by accident, managed to rap on the side of his wine glass, the sound of the crystal ringing out and catching everyone’s attention as Jim stood up at the head of the table.

“Bones and I just want to thank you all for coming today to be with us to celebrate, and Jo, especially, thank you for planning all of this. God knows if it had been left up to us, Bones would’ve made sure there was enough whiskey to float the Enterprise and I’d be doing food so we’d maybe have a stale bag of chips to eat.” He grinned, soaking in the amused laughter and good cheer.

“Fifty years happily married seems like an impossibility, particularly to those of you who knew me back when Bones and I first met, but there it is. We’ve been together all this time and neither Romulans nor Kingons, plagues nor Admirals nor plagues _of_ Admirals have managed to pull us apart.” And now Jim picked up his glass, tilting it towards his husband in salute.

“Bones, you’ve saved me. You’ve saved me not only from the universe’s hostility but also from my own stupidity more times than I can count. You swore never to love again and then let me worm my charmingly persistent way in to your heart. You’ve been there for me in my darkest and brightest moments and let me do the same for you. I don’t know who I would be without you in my life and I’m gladder than I can say that I never had to find out.

“We know better than anyone how easily small events can change the universe in ways too complex to imagine so it’s possible that in other, sadder, darker realities there may be Jim Kirks who never even knew what the hell they were missing not having you by their side and in their bed. But let me just say here, before our friends and our family, that I would not change a single thing in my life if it meant even the slightest chance that I wouldn’t have you. Here’s to you, love.” Jim leaned over to claim a kiss from his Bones, who tried (and completely failed) to glower at his husband as he sat down to thunderous applause.

“Dammit, man, I’m a doctor, not a public speaker, and I’m not any good at things like this,” Bones said, standing up, but there wasn’t even an attempt to hide the sincere look of love in his eyes as he faced Jim, whose breath caught in his throat at that look even after all these years.

“I’m not a speech writer, so I’m just gonna steal somebody else’s line. Jim, love, ‘that we arrive at fifty years together is due as much to luck as to love, and a talent for knowing, when we stumble, where to fall, and how to get up again.’ It was purest luck that brought us together on that damn shuttle in Iowa, and even back then you trusted that I would be there to help you up when you stumbled and fell. I always was – I always will be.”

And then Bones was tapping the edge of his own wine glass against Jim’s before holding it out to the crowd. “Here’s to your luck, Jim, which brought us together, protected your damn fool head through thick and thin, and gave us fifty glorious years together. Let’s see if it can pull off fifty more.”

“To the Keptin and his doctor!” Chekov called out followed by Spock’s, “To Bones and Jim!”

“To us,” Jim agreed, smiling softly.


End file.
